Teachers use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments. Teachers:
a. promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness.
b. engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources.
c. promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students' conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.
d. model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students, colleagues, and others in face-to-face and virtual environments.
The artifact I chose for this standard was a monster exchange project that was completed with a class in South Carolina. We were paired up through a website called Monster Exchange. Each student designed a monster and wrote detailed instructions on how to make his/her monster. The instructions were sent to the other class and each student received one set of instructions. The students in the other class drew the monster using only the instructions provided by the paired students. My students did the same using the instructions from the other class. The pictures were then uploaded, and the students could see whether their instructions were detailed enough.
The website that paired classes for the project:
(The pictures are hyper-linked to actual web pages.)
My class:
An individual student entry from my class:
(Unfortunately, the partner teacher never uploaded her students' drawings.)
My partner teacher's class:
One of the monsters from the partner class next to the monster one of my students drew:
When I had small group, self-contained classes I feel I was rather strong in implementing this standard. Now that I am co-teaching and have to make compromises, this standard hasn't been covered by me nearly as well. My co-teachers are resistant to devoting too much class time to group projects which seems to be one of the easiest and most motivating ways to put this standard into action.
I think my artifact for the Monster Exchange program fits all subcategories of this standard, but some areas were more strongly met than others. The encouragement of creative thinking and inventiveness (Indicator A) on the students’ part was developed when they created their own monsters. I actually had them take it a step further than the project guidelines by giving their monsters personalities. One student’s description was as follows
This was a much more creative response than I was getting from my students in their typical journal writing. The freedom of being able to create whatever kind of monster they wanted seemed to really motivate the students.
Although this project wasn’t necessarily a real-world issue (Indicator B), it was a start in preparing the students to communicate with people they never met in person. This is very likely something they would encounter in the workplace as adults. The students were also communicating with real people. Knowing this, they were more concerned than they usually would have been in making their instructions very clear. The students used Word to type their descriptions. They also took pictures of their drawings and uploaded them to the Internet. This gave them experience with digital tools.
For Indicator C, the students first wrote out their directions and then had me draw a monster using their directions. Any area I felt was unclear, I purposefully drew incorrectly. I then gave feedback regarding areas that needed changed. After changes were made, a class partner tried to draw the monster using the description. The two then collaborated together to determine which instructions needed more clarification. This portion of the activity was frustrating for the students but it really helped them fine tune their directions through reflection and collaboration with others. Typically, anything my students wrote, they considered to be perfect. They never wanted to edit or add to what they wrote. This experience taught them that they had to improve their writing because they didn't communicate clearly enough. It was a very visual way of showing them that their first and second draft still needed tweaking.
Finally, for Indicator D, the students uploaded their directions so that through a virtual environment they could collaborate with other students. My students were very excited to draw using the other classes’ directions and compare their results with the original drawing. Unfortunately, even though my students did their part, the other class never finished the final step of showing the drawings they made using my students' directions. This was very disappointing. In a way, a lesson was demonstrated to my students showing how discouraging it is when someone drops the ball. We talked about how they should keep this in mind if they’re ever tempted to give up on a commitment. Since the students worked so hard on this project, I had another class I taught draw the monsters using their directions. It wasn’t as exciting as it would have been if the other class had participated, but they at least got that final feedback.
This experience was also a lesson for me. It would have been easy for me to chalk this experience up as a complete failure and never consider an online exchange again. Instead, I just kept in mind that sometimes these exchanges fall through, and it is important to have a back-up plan. The important thing is that the students improved their writing and reading skills through this project while learning how to collaborate and use digital tools.
My strengths in this project were staying organized, effectively breaking up the project into attainable steps and keeping up with the technological aspects of the project. My weaknesses involved wanting to help the students too much in writing their description when they needed to learn for themselves and not being as persistent as I could have been with the teacher who never followed through on the final phase of the project.
Teachers use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments. Teachers:
a. promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness.
b. engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources.
c. promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students' conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.
d. model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students, colleagues, and others in face-to-face and virtual environments.
The website that paired classes for the project:
(The pictures are hyper-linked to actual web pages.)
My class:
An individual student entry from my class:
(Unfortunately, the partner teacher never uploaded her students' drawings.)
My partner teacher's class:
One of the monsters from the partner class next to the monster one of my students drew:
When I had small group, self-contained classes I feel I was rather strong in implementing this standard. Now that I am co-teaching and have to make compromises, this standard hasn't been covered by me nearly as well. My co-teachers are resistant to devoting too much class time to group projects which seems to be one of the easiest and most motivating ways to put this standard into action.
I think my artifact for the Monster Exchange program fits all subcategories of this standard, but some areas were more strongly met than others. The encouragement of creative thinking and inventiveness (Indicator A) on the students’ part was developed when they created their own monsters. I actually had them take it a step further than the project guidelines by giving their monsters personalities. One student’s description was as follows
Although this project wasn’t necessarily a real-world issue (Indicator B), it was a start in preparing the students to communicate with people they never met in person. This is very likely something they would encounter in the workplace as adults. The students were also communicating with real people. Knowing this, they were more concerned than they usually would have been in making their instructions very clear. The students used Word to type their descriptions. They also took pictures of their drawings and uploaded them to the Internet. This gave them experience with digital tools.
For Indicator C, the students first wrote out their directions and then had me draw a monster using their directions. Any area I felt was unclear, I purposefully drew incorrectly. I then gave feedback regarding areas that needed changed. After changes were made, a class partner tried to draw the monster using the description. The two then collaborated together to determine which instructions needed more clarification. This portion of the activity was frustrating for the students but it really helped them fine tune their directions through reflection and collaboration with others. Typically, anything my students wrote, they considered to be perfect. They never wanted to edit or add to what they wrote. This experience taught them that they had to improve their writing because they didn't communicate clearly enough. It was a very visual way of showing them that their first and second draft still needed tweaking.
Finally, for Indicator D, the students uploaded their directions so that through a virtual environment they could collaborate with other students. My students were very excited to draw using the other classes’ directions and compare their results with the original drawing. Unfortunately, even though my students did their part, the other class never finished the final step of showing the drawings they made using my students' directions. This was very disappointing. In a way, a lesson was demonstrated to my students showing how discouraging it is when someone drops the ball. We talked about how they should keep this in mind if they’re ever tempted to give up on a commitment. Since the students worked so hard on this project, I had another class I taught draw the monsters using their directions. It wasn’t as exciting as it would have been if the other class had participated, but they at least got that final feedback.
This experience was also a lesson for me. It would have been easy for me to chalk this experience up as a complete failure and never consider an online exchange again. Instead, I just kept in mind that sometimes these exchanges fall through, and it is important to have a back-up plan. The important thing is that the students improved their writing and reading skills through this project while learning how to collaborate and use digital tools.
My strengths in this project were staying organized, effectively breaking up the project into attainable steps and keeping up with the technological aspects of the project. My weaknesses involved wanting to help the students too much in writing their description when they needed to learn for themselves and not being as persistent as I could have been with the teacher who never followed through on the final phase of the project.